The means we use to access material goods influences the relationships we establish with them. Do they come from robberies, conquests, barter, purchase, loans, gifts, donations? What kind of currency did we use? Depending on the mean of acquisition, the fates and social dynamics attached to each object differ wildly.

Purchasing and owning, as neutral as it may seem, binds us to an original robery. Once upon a time, sometimes a long time ago, a human being came on that land and declared “it’s mine”. The cell phone you buy has lot’s of material extracted from the Earth, and so on. The spirit of conquest, competition, proprietarization, possession triggered by our scarce monetary system floats in the air, in the culture, to the point we don’t think about it anymore. We won’t see that anymore when we’ll use sufficient currencies that will flow in direct proportion with our capacity to exchange. As for the gift economy, it creates a dynamics that frees us from all the flaws I just mentioned.

Therefore the very design of a currency triggers specific states of consciousness. Predatory, archaic, conquering in the case of scarce money. Open and generous in the case of sufficient currencies. Compassionate and creative in the case of technologies supporting a gift economy. The obsession of possessing torments us less in an economy of free currencies than in an economy of scarce money. It leaves us completely in the case of gift economy.

More and more people will realize how the evolution of consciousness of humanity implies the use of a new language, alive and non-Aristotelian: the language of flows. A revolution as important as the writing in its time.